Incidentally, the purpose of this is not to encourage 'illegal' migrants to leave our shores. The purpose is to scare such people into keeping their heads down and continuing to work in shitty cash-in-hand jobs for less than minimum wage and paying rent to slum landlords. These migrants have their place in the neoliberal utopia just like everyone else, but as it's not a very nice place at all the state needs to use these sorts of scare tactics to keep them in that place.
Border controls serve a similar purpose. Treating migrants like shit in places like Calais is not done to convince them to go home- even the simplest copper or border official can see that many of them don't have any home left to go to- but to get them to keep their heads down once they make it to the UK for fear of getting deported back to Greece, Italy or wherever and having to make their way back across Europe again.
Describing people as 'illegal' is just a way of dressing racist policies up as something just and fair. These people have not proven their right to be in this country, therefore they have no such right and should be removed. That will only be a just and fair policy when it becomes necessary for every inhabitant of these islands to prove their worth, rather than just the ones who were born elsewhere.
If the drivers of one of these vans were extracted from his cab by a pan-ethnic consortium of concerned local people and severely beaten that would in my opinion be a justifiable act in the cause of preventing violence, both psychological and physical, against innocent people.
